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Japan to Develop “Drone Flight Spacial Information System” for Country’s Cities

Kobe-based Swift Xi and its part­ners have signed an agree­ment with the government’s New Ener­gy and Indus­tri­al Tech­nol­o­gy Devel­op­ment Organ­i­sa­tion (NEDO), to devel­op a 3D spa­cial infor­ma­tion sys­tem, intend­ed to safe­ly guide drones and then lat­er eVTOLs, through Japan’s cities and gen­er­al urban land­scapes, reports akihabaranews.com.

Swift Xi is a Japan joint ven­ture between Swift Engi­neer­ing, head­quar­tered in San Clemente, Cal­i­for­nia, and the Kobe Insti­tute of Com­put­ing. The firm pro­vides data and IT ser­vices, logis­tics, and full-ser­vice oper­a­tions of autonomous and robot­ic tech­nolo­gies.

Alex Echev­er­ria, Pres­i­dent of Swift Tac­ti­cal Sys­tems, anoth­er group com­pa­ny, com­ment­ed. “This project, with its goal of cre­at­ing a 3D spa­tial infor­ma­tion infra­struc­ture, will estab­lish safe flight paths for unmanned aer­i­al vehi­cles and urban air mobil­i­ty cor­ri­dors in urban areas… dri­ving the devel­op­ment of new infra­struc­ture that will enable the safe and effi­cient oper­a­tion of autonomous unmanned aer­i­al vehi­cles and cre­ate new val­ue using spa­tial iden­ti­fi­ca­tion.”

Hiro Mat­sushi­ta, chair­man and CEO at Swift Group, added, “We would like to be the very first team in the world to estab­lish a safe 3D spa­tial infor­ma­tion infra­struc­ture sys­tem.”

Four oth­er firms are involved in the project.

: Kitakyushu-based map pub­lish­er Zen­rin (to devel­op a flight risk man­age­ment sys­tem pro­to­type using algo­rithms).

: Tokyo-based Space Ser­vice Inno­va­tion Lab­o­ra­to­ry (SSIL) (to design the 3D spa­tial infor­ma­tion infra­struc­ture).

: Tokyo-based Loca­tion­Mind (to pro­vide dynam­ic data on the flow of peo­ple, etc., to decrease flight risks and test the use­ful­ness of its spoof­ing pro­tec­tion sys­tem).

: Osa­ka-based Intel­li­gent Style (to cre­ate the data­base archi­tec­ture).

Via this col­lab­o­ra­tion, NEDO aims to ren­der spa­tial iden­ti­fi­ca­tion into a stan­dard index, mak­ing it eas­i­er to search, inte­grate, and utilise in a machine-read­able for­mat. Aside from drones and eVTOLs, the sys­tem is expect­ed to have appli­ca­tions for self-dri­ving cars and auto­mat­ic deliv­ery robots as well.

https://evtolinsights.com/2023/01/osaka-expo-2025-organisers-begin-recruitment-process-for-evtol-operators/

This devel­op­ment is very impor­tant with the Osa­ka Expo 2025, to be held in Kan­sai, lit­tle more than two years away. Japan is deter­mined to make this six month event a show­case for both drones and eVTOLs.

(News Source: akihabaranews.com)

(Top pho­to: Get­ty Images)

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